The IPO window is open, which means that companies of all sorts are hitting go and launching their firms into the arms of the public.
Among the most interesting companies likely to go public inside the next two years is Egnyte, which I have been covering for a few years now. Egnyte has been willing to share more of its plans and financial performance than most companies, making it something akin to a living tech startup experiment; we have been able to watch it grow.
(Nexmo, Spotify and Uber to some extent, as well as others are examples of companies that have also shared financial data while they were private companies — even if in the case of Uber, the numbers leaked via a third-party.)
Egnyte recently altered its business model away from being a cloud storage provider focused on helping businesses with large on-premise installations get onto the cloud. The company now wants to be, as I wrote last month, “the intelligence layer between any company’s current storage system and their cloud provider of choice.”
So I dragooned Egnyte’s CEO Vineet Jain to come to TechCrunch and talk to us about the new direction of his company, a potential IPO and what is next from the company when it comes to product.
Typically, Jain was candid: No IPO in the next 12 months, but yes to the idea inside of 18 months. That means Egnyte should go public before next summer or, perhaps, roughly a year after Box jumped into the pool.
The Box comparison is irresistible, given that while Egnyte remains a far smaller company — Box has revenue of three times or more — it has a quicker ramp to the black. Jain wants his company to hit cash-flow break-even by the end of this year, and then profits in early 2016. That will make Egnyte profitable before Box, presuming that the latter’s current curves hold.
All told, take the clip as a decent marking point for a company in a crowded market that is looking to go public. Here’s what a CEO thinks while still in the antechamber.